{"id":532,"date":"2010-04-15T09:58:17","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T16:58:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/?p=532"},"modified":"2010-09-19T12:56:43","modified_gmt":"2010-09-19T19:56:43","slug":"need-iscsi-try-nexenta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greg.porter.name\/wordpress\/?p=532","title":{"rendered":"Need inexpensive iSCSI? Try NexentaStor!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"NexentaStor<\/a>

NexentaStor 3.0 Main Dashboard<\/p><\/div>\n

I’ve been using Openfiler for a long time now, but I’m always open to alternatives.\u00a0 Recently I stumbled across NexentaStor<\/a>, which is a software product you can load on your servers to make them into filers, like Openfiler.\u00a0 NexentaStor is available both in an Community Edition<\/a>, as well as a relatively inexpensive Enterprise Edition<\/a>, which comes with all the bells and whistles like built in block level replication.<\/p>\n

NexentaStor is “Linux-like”, but is based on an OpenSolaris kernel, not Linux.\u00a0 One big advantage is of this is that OpenSolaris (and hence, NexentaStor) runs the ZFS file system<\/a>.\u00a0 ZFS is the next generation file system, and offers all sorts of file system goodness<\/a>, chief of which it’s meant to run on lots of cheap disks.\u00a0 No more expensive RAID arrays required for reliability.<\/p>\n

The free NexentaStor 3.0 Community Edition<\/a> has been working fine for me in testing as a backend for XenServer hypervisors.\u00a0 It has been up and stable for a couple weeks with multiple vm’s running on it.<\/p>\n

The Enterprise Edition<\/a> offers everything the Community Edition supports *PLUS* plugins available for replication, virtualization, and more.\u00a0 You can easily build an “enterprise class” filer with all of the same features as the “big boys”<\/a> have, for much, much less.<\/p>\n

The NexentaStor <\/a>website says:<\/p>\n

NexentaStor 3.x Community ISO<\/strong> CD images can be installed on \u201cbare-metal\u201d x86\/64 hardware and VM installed images are available below as well. The hardware compatibility lists for OpenSolaris 10.03<\/a> indicate what is supported. The NexentaStor installer also verifies<\/strong> hardware compatibility before installation commences. For more information on hardware compatibility please visit NexentaStor FAQ<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is a major NexentaStor release, with many new features, improved hardware support, and many bug fixes over the older Developer Edition including:<\/p>\n